Month: June 2016

(credit: modpr0be)

For more than a month, users of the remote login service TeamViewer have taken to Internet forums to report their computers have been ransacked by attackers who somehow gained access to their accounts. In many of the cases, the online burglars reportedly drained PayPal or bank accounts. No one outside of TeamViewer knows precisely how many accounts have been hacked, but there's no denying the breaches are widespread.

Over the past three days, both Reddit and Twitter have exploded with such reports, often with the unsupported claim that the intrusions are the result of a hack on TeamViewer's network. Late on Friday afternoon, an IBM security researcher became the latest to report a TeamViewer account takeover.

"In the middle of my gaming session, I lose control of my mouse and the TeamViewer window pops up in the bottom right corner of my screen," wrote Nick Bradley, a practice leader inside IBM's Threat Research Group. "As soon as I realize what is happening, I kill the application. Then it dawns on me: I have other machines running TeamViewer!"

The second-highest administrator on Silk Road 2, the copycat site that followed the shuttered underground drug website Silk Road, was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison—the same term that government prosecutors asked the judge to impose.

The sentencing came months after Brian Farrell, known online as "DoctorClu," pleaded guilty to one count of distribution of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Such crimes carry a minimum sentence of five years in prison.

Federal agents searched Farrell’s home on January 2, 2015 after they got information that he was closely involved in SR2. There, they "seized three handguns, various computer media, various prescription medications, drug paraphernalia, 20 silver bullion bars valued at $3,900.00, and approximately $35,000 in US currency." In addition to the prison sentence, the cash and silver bullion will be forfeited to the government.

Tony Fadell. (credit: BBC News)

After six years at the smart home company Nest, Tony Fadell will be stepping down as CEO. He announced his decision via a Nest blog post, which details that Fadell will be transitioning to an advisory role at Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Google bought Nest back in 2014.

The new Nest CEO will be Marwan Fawaz, who previously worked at Motorola Mobility as executive vice president. The blog post sites Fawaz's engineering and connected home background as well as his "experience with global service providers" as credentials for his leadership role at Nest. It also stated that Nest has a two-year product roadmap already in place for Fawaz to take over as he begins.

Fadell's transition has been in the works since "late last year," and his new role at Alphabet will give him the flexibility to dabble in other fields. Here's Fadell's statement:

Concept image of a harvester for Deep Space Industries. (credit: Deep Space Industries)

Luxembourg, a small European country about the size of Rhode Island, wants to be the Silicon Valley of the space mining industry. The landlocked Grand Duchy announced Friday it was opening a €200 million ($225 million) line of credit for entrepreneurial space companies to set up their European headquarters within its borders.

Luxembourg has already reached agreements with two US-based companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, to open offices in Luxembourg and conduct major research and development activities. "We intend to become the European center for asteroid mining," said Étienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, during a news conference Friday.

The mining of space resources is a long bet. Although some deep-pocketed investors from Google and other companies have gotten behind Planetary Resources, and people like Amazon's Jeff Bezos have speculated that within a couple of decades most manufacturing and resource gathering will be done off Earth, there is precious little activity today. Humans have never visited an asteroid, and NASA is only just planning to launch its first robotic mission to visit and gather samples from an asteroid, OSIRIS-REx, this summer.

Enlarge / Poor little Ron the Drone. Something bad is beyond this door and he's going to have to face it by himself.

My ship is docked at one end of an abandoned space station, and I’m staring intently at a flickering schematic view of the facility. Jill, one of my three squatty remote maintenance drones, is funneling energy into a power inlet so I can operate a few doors. Twiki is gathering scrap in what looks like an abandoned corridor—scrap I desperately need in order to repair my ship’s video system, which has been on the fritz. Ron is carefully scanning rooms for hidden materials for Twiki to gather up.

The situation is tense but manageable. This outpost showed an unknown infestation type, but I’m being careful, closing doors behind my drones, making sure to not leave a drone for too long in a room with a vent—because things can crawl out of vents.

Without warning, a door flashes red. "DOOR 22 IS BEING ATTACKED" appears on the console. It’s the door to the room where Jill is powering the ship, and I quickly decide it’s time to get the hell out.

Depending on one's life view, the character Qyburn in the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is evil, a genius, or an evil genius.

The former "maester" of the Citadel engaged in vivisecting people, and he holds the power to bring back the dead (or at least the moribund). Qyburn once famously brought back a poisoned and moribund Gregor Clegane, the character referred to as "The Mountain."  In short, he has mad, resurrection-like skills—and this fact didn't go unnoticed by a US federal appeals court on Thursday.

Qyburn's name, or at least a play off it, has officially entered the US law books. In a published concurring opinion by the nation's largest federal appeals court, two judges from the San Francsico-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the majority's opinion "comes very close to a qyburnian resurrection (PDF) of the Jiffy June standard."